Before There Was Computer Porn, There Was This Guy

The sorry, sordid life (and afterlife) of Leisure Suit Larry

Larry Laffer, the concupiscent software salesman, is thinner than I remembered. He's still goofy, though, dressed in his trademark permanent-press white leisure suit, black shirt and gold chains. He's still terrible around women, always saying the wrong thing, always in pressing need of Binaca. And at the moment, he's getting pissed on by a black dog as he tries to figure out how to walk through the entrance of Lefty's, a dive bar located in the city of Lost Wages (get it?).

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I'm playing the original 1987 version of Leisure Suit Larry: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards for the first time since I was eleven, maybe twelve. I can't remember. Nor can I remember how, back in the late '80s, my brother and I were able to sneak this bit of contraband past our parents, or how the game even came into our possession to begin with. What I do remember—vividly—is that it was forbidden, a conduit into the scuzzy side of adult life that arrived in the form of a floppy disk.

The goal of the game is simple: Get Larry laid with a woman of decent repute. In Lost Wages—a city where women do little but smile, frown, flirt with you, cockblock you, ask you for your money, steal your money, and sometimes allow you to have sex with them in exchange for an apple—this is no mean feat. These women are, as the packaging warned me as a child, "the kind of girls your mother warned you about."

As I imagine was the case for most of the game's juvenile fans, I was too young for my mom to warn me about any kind of girls, or to learn from anyone else how to meet them. Instead, I had Larry. Larry, who served as both my guide and warning.

Ken Williams, a former programmer for IBM, started what would become Sierra Entertainment in 1979. Williams' first release, MysteryHouse, an interactive murder mystery game, was also one of the first computer games to combine graphics with an interactive story, allowing the player to explore this virtual world by typing simple instructions like "walk north."

In 1981, Chuck Benton, a database programmer, designed Softporn Adventure, a text adventure game that he wrote as a lark meant to parody the life of a horny single male. Williams had come across Softporn Adventure and struck a deal to license it. Williams packaged the game with a provocative cover featuring his wife, Roberta, and two other women—all nude and inside a hot tub, presumably waiting for a male gamer to join them.

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"It was a little bit risque, but nothing like what they put on TV these days," said Williams. The game quickly sold four-thousand copies upon its release. It went on to sell more than twenty-five thousand.

(Despite the title, Softporn Adventure wasn't as blatantly vulgar as games like Custer's Revenge, released in 1982 for the Atari 2600, which featured a computerized General George Armstrong Custer, naked and sporting a monstrous erection, attempting to have intercourse with an Indian woman who is tied to a pole while arrows are shot at him.)

As you might expect, Softporn Adventure did not age well. "When I played it, it was so out of date," said Al Lowe, the creator of Leisure Suit Larry who joined Sierra in 1982. "I told Ken, 'This game is so out of touch it should be wearing a leisure suit.'"

So in 1986 Lowe was tasked to design a game similar to Softporn Adventure, but with graphics, and a pathetic chump as a lead. The character had to be "somebody who anybody playing the game would be able to feel superior to," Lowe says. He drew his inspiration, he said in a Reddit AMA in June, from a Sierra software salesman who would often brag about the number of girls he nailed during sales trips.

Lowe finished his design of Leisure Suit Larry in three months, with designer Mark Crowe handling the graphics for the game. While much of the game revolved around Larry's advertised "jerkisms," the final design made him seem more affable than the designers intended, perhaps in part to his Dustin Hoffman-esque schnoz. "I remember Larry had a big nose because we only had one pixel we could turn on," said Lowe. "On the standard character, if you add a dot, he had a huge nose. If he had no dot, he had no nose."

At first, Larry's subject matter made it hard for Sierra to market. RadioShack, which had been a big seller of Sierra's other games, was owned by Tandy Corporation, which was helmed by John Roach, a devout Christian who, it went without saying, would not look favorably upon Leisure Suit Larry. Even the employees charged with approving computer products at RadioShack refused to have the game shipped to them. "They were so scared that they would get caught by John Roach," says Lowe.

Other computer outlets, however—like Software ETC., Babbage's, Egghead Software and CompUSA—agreed to stock Larry. "In a time when most games shipped fifty-thousand units in the first day, Larry sold four-thousand units," says Lowe. But momentum built quickly, largely due to word-of-mouth. Every month, sales doubled. Within a year, the game had sold a quarter of a million copies and was a top-ten seller in the country. And it wasn't just men. It had "a huge female player base," according to Brenda Romero, a video game designer who wrote the book Sex in Video Games under the name Brenda Braithwaite. (Not all copies were being obtained legitimately. "We did notice that hint book sales were quite brisk in proportion to game sales," said Lowe. "So many kids stole that game.")

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The game spawned a series of sequels like Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (In Several Wrong Places) and Magna Cum Laude and sold upwards of ten million copies in its lifetime. The rights to the game eventually fell into the hands of Codemasters, a British video game developer, which made Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust for the XBOX 360 (it got a score of twenty-five on Metacritic). Replay Games then bought the rights from Codemasters to sell the original versions of Leisure Suit Larry and the rights to remake the games. In June, Replay released Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded, a modern update of In the Land of the Lounge Lizards. The game was developed with the aid of over $655,000 raised through Kickstarter.

Adding a layer of real sleaze to Larry's ersatz variety, Lowe left Replay Games in December after learning that Paul Trowe, the company's president, pleaded guilty to showing an explicit video to a minor. In October, before all that went down, Trowe had told me that Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded had been selling "more than we forecasted."

Before I could get into the game (Al Lowe sent me a copy), I have to answer five questions the programmers put in—in the time before Google—to winnow the children from the adults. (Among them: What is Jaws about, and what song did Clint Eastwood sing in Paint Your Wagon?) Once in, I'm quickly reminded that Larry is about as well versed in pickup technique as I was playing it as an eleven-year-old kid. "Hi there lovely legs," he says to a girl at a bar, prompting her boyfriend to nearlystomp Larry's ass into the ground.

The gameplay is simple. You type in the instructions and Larry obeys. You know, like "play jukebox" or "talk to pimp." You use the arrows on your keyboard to make him walk in geometric patterns. There were other things that come back to me, like having to play blackjack and the slots for more money, or having to give whiskey to every drunk Larry meets. For everything else that I forgot about, there was Google. I have no clue how anyone could play this game without the aid of Google or a hint book, which is probably why Sierra sold so many of them.

What I did remember were the women. They are either horny or duplicitous, and they are uniformly one-dimensional. In the eyes of the gamer, each woman is a puzzle to be solved, or an obstacle to circumvent on your way to the goal.

There is Fawn, a pretty blonde girl whom Larry meets at a club, who promises to marry him, should Larry bestow upon her gifts like a box of chocolate and a diamond ring (found inside a bathroom sink, no less). They marry at a "Quicki Wed" chapel, then, as they're about to consummate the union, she ties him to the bed then robs him blind.

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There is the nameless prostitute Larry could sleep with but really you shouldn't. If he neglects to use a condom, his genitals pulsate and light up in different colors and he dies. If he uses one, he merely feels tremendous shame.

Then there is Eve, the prize of the game, whom Larry finds after sneaking into a penthouse apartment. Instead of tazing Larry or calling the authorities, Eve invites him to join her in the hot tub. He gives her an apple, which she eats in provocative fashion, "tiny drops of the apple's juice glistening on her lips," as the game puts it. As her token of gratitude, she leads Larry into the bathroom and proceeds to deflower him. Success.

Did Larry rob me of my innocence? Of course not. His virtual dalliances were tame (the three instances of coitus in Larry are blocked with a large black censor). Nor was I—I know you're wondering—compelled to attempt to procure sex with produce. But the game did do something. It gave me an early glimpse of the pains and humiliations, the low comedy and high farce inherent in sexual pursuit. That message took on a resonance when I entered into that pursuit myself—and not without farce (the terrible skinny-dipping injury, the English girl whose friends wrote "twat" on my forehead as I slept in her bed). Larry, I came to realize, may have been a schmuck, but his schmuckiness was also the perfect embodiment of the male libido: Clumsy, grasping, insatiable—the "idiot" Kingsley Amis claimed he'd been chained to for the better part of his life. Yes, Larry Laffer was a figure of fun, yes he was created for the purposes of mockery, but laugh at your peril. He is us, and we are him.

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